All posts tagged Harvard

A survey of schools across 16 cities of India has ranked 6 schools in Delhi among the top 10.

Parents in Delhi have reason to cheer. Out of India’s top 10 day schools, six are in the city, including No.1 ranked The Shri Ram School, according to the latest annual survey by Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd. and Education World magazine.

This year’s survey of 404 schools across 16 Indian cities based its rankings on interviews with thousands of principals, teachers and parents. The Shri Ram School, which regularly scores highly in such surveys, returns to the top of the pile after losing out to Mumbai’s Cathedral and John Connon School in 2010. Read More »

A new biography of Indian nationalist hero Subhas Chandra Bose could help resuscitate the leader’s troubled reputation outside of India.

Mr. Bose sided with Imperial Japan and the Nazis during World War Two in a move of realpolitik aimed at securing backing for his Indian National Army and its war for an independent India.

Long a member of the pantheon of Indian nationalist heroes, Mr. Bose is held in mild contempt in the West for his dalliance with totalitarian powers. In Japan, he is still hugely admired, and his ashes are believed to be housed in Tokyo’s Renjoki temple. Read More »

February is a cruel month for parents of tots in India’s competitive capital—it’s when parents brace themselves as nursery schools release their lists of admissions.

The first list of names came out Tuesday, which is why, if you were looking, nine of the top 10 Google Trends searches in India were Delhi nursery schools. Remaining lists for general admissions will continue to come out through the month.

There’s been a lot of chat and cogitation over what will happen in India if Kapil Sibal, minister of human resource development, gets his way and Parliament passes legislation to allow in foreign universities. The assumption, given all the statistics we all know about India’s growth prospects, is that Yale,

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Harvard University, like many others in the Ivy League, provides students with a much better education than many universities in India. The U.S. attracts Indian students in excess of 100,000, more than any other country.

Harvard and every other Ivy League University would suddenly come clamoring to build a campus.

If you speak to delegates from American universities, many of whom are in town this week as part of the giant U.S. delegation around the Obama visit, this is pie in the sky. In fact, it’s more like pie in space, it’s so unlikely to happen.

First, even if the law is changed, there are the often-recited restrictions that would likely be imposed on any foreigners regarding caps on faculty salaries and fees, to say nothing of the heavy bureaucracy that foreign universities would be unwilling to tolerate. Read More »

Gita Gopinath is the first Indian woman to get tenure at Harvard’s economics department.

Harvard’s Gita Gopinath remembers Ben Bernanke, who used to be one of her academic advisors, as being very reserved and hard to read. These are traits he exploits as a central banker.

“It was hard to figure out what he was thinking. That has served him well in his current job,” said Ms. Gopinath, who late April became the first Indian woman to get tenure at Harvard University’s economics department.

Mr. Bernanke was one of Ms. Gopinath’s advisors on her thesis on international macroeconomics and trade at Princeton University. Read More »

Ten years ago today, with the May 11, 2000, birth of Aastha Arora, India’s population hit one billion.

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India: One billion and counting for 10 years.

It became the second country in the world to achieve that milestone, after China. The nation is still growing and isn’t expected to stop for another 50 years.

Earlier India was predicted to overtake China’s population by 2045, but more recent United Nations projections estimate that it could happen in as few as 20 years. And yet Indian officials don’t always speak of the population as gloomily as they did in the 1980s, when ubiquitous advertising told prospective parents that “Us two and our two” made for the perfect, smaller family.

Technological developments in food production and health care have meant that the world, and India, have been able to stay ahead of some of the most dire predictions made by population pessimists. Which is why it’s not easy to declare whether a growing population is “a social disaster or a social resource“, a question Time posed in 1971.

A number of South Asians have been entangled in the insider trading investigation surrounding U.S. hedge fund Galleon Group. Some were quite prominent (Anil Kumar of McKinsey, Rajiv Goel of Intel) some were not (alleged tipster Deep Shah.)

But none compared to the big name that has now surfaced: Rajat Gupta, who became the first non-American to run McKinsey & Co., a consulting firm, and the first Indian-born CEO of any big-time transnational company.

The WSJ has reported that federal prosecutors are examining whether Mr. Gupta passed along inside information about Goldman Sachs, where Mr. Gupta is a board director, to Galleon. The government hasn’t charged Mr. Gupta. His lawyer, Gary Naftalis, strongly denied that he’s done anything wrong. Read More »

Fatima Bhutto, in India for the release of her memoir “Songs of Blood and Sword” about Pakistan’s foremost political family, took a side swipe at journalists as she spoke about Pakistan, her assassinated aunt Benazir Bhutto, and her search to uncover the murky facts surrounding the killing of her adored father. Mir Murtaza Bhutto was slain by police outside her Karachi home in 1996, when she was just 14.

Benazir was empowered greatly by the Western press because she was “‘One of us,’ as it were,” said Bhutto, 27 years old, in conversation with the bard of Mughal India, William Dalrymple, in Delhi on Saturday. “Oxford, Harvard, beautiful, speaks English, and follows orders. When the IMF says, ‘Sign this,’ she signs. When America said, ‘Do that,’ she did.” Read More »

Not that long ago, almost every Indian parent’s dream for their children (never mind what the children wanted) was for them to become doctors and engineers. I bucked the trend, much to my parents’ dismay.

The old molds and attitudes continue to exist but we’ve created new ones in this country to accommodate India’s growing economy. When India opened its doors to international trade and investment, it brought about opportunities in the private sector that previously hadn’t existed. The typical trajectory for a student finishing high school these days is to go from an engineering degree (preferably at the best Indian Institute of Technology you can get into) directly to an Masters of Business Administrations (at an Indian Institute of Management, Indian School of Business, or, if your dreams come true, Harvard).

In Mumbai, where I currently live, MBAs are a dime a dozen. These are bright, hard-working kids, and all of them want to get into lucrative private sector jobs. Now, there is nothing wrong with that aspiration. The high demand for graduates of top-notch MBA programs and the promise of fat pay packages from the private sector in areas such as investment banking, private equity, and management consultancy fuels the supply. As an economist, I have nothing against this idea, either. But what is striking is the fact that increasingly firms seem to be streaming people much like the educational system in this country. Speaking from personal experience during the course of my own job search, the human resources focus for many top firms, including the top recruitment and executive search firms, seems to be almost entirely MBA-driven. Read More »

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